


Two Hundred to Go

by ChokolatteJedi



Category: Salt (2010)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Female Anti-Hero, Female-Centric, Gen, Post-Canon, Slaughter and Mayhem, Spies & Secret Agents, Yuletide, Yuletide 2012
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:25:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChokolatteJedi/pseuds/ChokolatteJedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Evelyn Salt made a promise, and now she has to keep it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Hundred to Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ideal_girl (trainwreckdress)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trainwreckdress/gifts).



> Thanks so much to both of my betas, Undauntra and BridgetM for wrangling unruly commas and helping me whip this into shape! And for Framlingem for the maths help (I made some changes afterwards, so any remaining mistakes are mine).

Evelyn spent six hours watching the first safe house. It wasn't hers alone, but one that several agents based in RINK used. Winter had used it too, so she knew that it would have everything she could possibly need. She supposed that she should call him Nikolai, but he had always been Winter to her, and she found it a hard change to make. 

Part of her still couldn't believe that Winter had been a KA as well, but then, so had she. So had Colonel Tomas -- Shnaider. There had been dozens of children in her group, and probably dozens in Winter's group. The class before her? Those would be faces she didn't recognize. They would be impossible to spot.

Well, not impossible. There was one sure way to spot a potential KA - the same way Winter had probably discovered her. Through her past.

She needed to get a list of all children whose families were killed in Russia since the Cold War. She needed names. Then she could track them down and kill them. By her estimation there were probably a hundred KAs out there unless the program had continued until the present day, in which case the number might be closer to two hundred. Aside from Orlov, she had killed eleven on the barge, and Winter, meaning that her score was only twelve out of maybe two hundred.

Those weren't the best odds, but considering that there had been 200 loyal agents a week ago, her score had increased by 1200 percent. And that was the one kind of math she liked to do.

There was a safe house in Richmond, and once she lost the handcuffs it would only take her about two hours to get there if she could get into a car. Fortunately, with the right motivation a friendly trucker was more than willing to give her a ride.

He even loaned her a cap which she slipped on, using the brim to hide her face. She couldn't risk going to the safe house right away without watching it for a while first, and she didn't want the trucker to know even approximately where it was either. Instead she had him drop her off outside a woman's shelter on the other side of town, which she was warmly ushered into.

The next morning, with a cleaner face, a worn but warm sweater that the shelter had provided, and her trucker's cap pulled low, Evelyn left the shelter and began to observe the safe house. She knew well what the CIA or Secret Service would do if they were staking out the place, but it looked completely clean. After six hours of careful observation, she decided she could risk going in quickly.

Still, she took precautions as she snuck inside. Her own bag was right where she left it, and Winter's things were easy to find. Even his secret Russian weapons cache was glaringly obvious now that she knew that she was looking for one.

She was in and out in less than fifteen minutes with none the wiser on the quiet suburban street. A quick contact lens change and another set of false teeth and she was ready to go. She checked in at one of the by-the-hour motels on the edge of town. It wasn't her preferred kind of accommodation, but it was the best she could do with just her cash on hand. She quickly dyed her short hair brown and trimmed it into a slightly different shape. She had never been fond of the pixie cut, but it was the most feminine thing she could do with the masculine crop Shnaider had given her. Her bruises from the fight in the bunker were blossoming across her face, and rather than covering them, she decided to let people draw their own conclusions.

Now convincingly the Mrs. Gomez on her spare identification, Evelyn checked out of the motel and hurried to a bank. She easily withdrew the entire Gomez life savings, with a sympathetic smile from the teller. That done, she hitched another ride, this time to Charleston.

All she needed now was a library.

There she could begin her research into American families killed in and around Russia. She knew of one or two that she had encountered through her work for the CIA, and those would make excellent starting points. She also remembered the name and face of every child from her class, once it came to that. Half of the men from the barge had been older than her – Winter's class, she supposed – but the rest were faces she could name. They were the first to go on her list, but she had made a promise – to Peabody, to Mike, to herself – that there would be many, many more.

SALT

Evelyn carefully sighted down the barrel of her sniper rifle. Tarnovetsky, aka Fred Stone, had married a woman who eventually became a governor, and had one child at home. Some part of her hadn't wanted to risk their involvement, so she waited for him to arrive at work. With two quick squeezes, it was done.

Fifteen down.

SALT

Melissa Kraft, (Yushakov), was easier than most to find. Evelyn had known once she found her that Annette North, (Yushakov) would be nearby. They had both been exceptionally slow, barely making it through the rigorous training that Orlov had put them through. Even though they had become two different women, she had known that they would find each other again. The only surprising part of hunting them down was discovering that Lorelai Groves (Shcherbina) was with them.

Upon reflection, however, it seemed logical to have more than one mole in that particular area of Hollywood. After all, look how closely she and Winter had been positioned. Evelyn watched their movements for a month, easily able to create the perfect plan. Moments after North entered the nail salon, Evelyn pulled down her black ski mask and slid out of her carefully positioned car.

That night, the news reported of a robbery-gone-wrong that resulted in the deaths of three innocent women. Evelyn crossed three more names off of her list.

Thirty four down.

SALT

Waiting for Ambassador Garmeaux (Repinzin) to check in to his hotel in New York, Evelyn idly wondered if Peabody had been following her progress. She wondered if he had a list like her own. A handful of names she had crossed off her list after finding reports of their deaths using CIA cover phrases, but she could never be sure if they were the work of Counterintelligence or simple coincidences.

She had, for one brief moment on the bus to Columbus, considered leaving some kind of calling card that he would know was hers, but she discarded the thought a second later. If he really wanted to check on her progress, he could track the KAs down the same way that she was.

And maybe he had. Maybe those half a dozen names were his contribution to her efforts. She would probably never know.

The hotel door opened, and she heard a voice saying " _De rien! Tout va bien!_ Leave me a little _vie privée, S'il vous plaît._ "

As soon as the door was closed she attacked, smashing her fist into his windpipe to stifle any yells. She slammed her other fist into his gut, doubling him over. A sharp kick to the side of his knee crippled him, and two crushing blows to the face did the rest. She waited a moment in the silence before checking for a pulse. Nothing.

Seventy-nine down.

SALT

Evelyn looked over the snowy fields of her homeland blankly. When she became Evelyn, instead of Natasha, she believed that she would never see this country again.

She had been wrong, in fact, as she had been there a handful of times for the CIA. Those had all been as Ivana Lisitsyn, however. This was her first – and last – time as Natasha Chenkov. It had become too dangerous to use her old CIA IDs, but there were those among Orlov's old network who knew only what she told them. Through them, she had arranged for all of the articles needed to visit various embassies around the globe. And finally, she had arranged for one last stop.

Home.

Shnaider had called it that, before blowing himself up.

Molchanovsky had begged to see it again before she killed him. As had Voskoboynikov. And now she had seen it again. Behind her, an inferno blazed through the compound that had, so long ago, been her entire life. But while this place had been her residence, it had never been the home that the others remembered. Even Mother Russia was meaningless to her now. No, her home had been in Washington DC, in the small apartment she shared with Michael. Everything before that had simply faded away in the moment he died.

Now, with Orlov long dead and his successor flambéed, there was no leadership left for the KA structure. The few remaining KAs – the ones she had been unable to trace down – would be left in their sleeper lives forever, unless they decided on their own to rise up. But those individual efforts would be small enough that the CIA could handle them, just as it handled the agents of every other country in the world. For the most part, the great KA Program had now met its fiery end.

Evelyn turned away from the bleak white landscape and faced the inferno.

One hundred and ninety-nine down.

Evelyn lifted her gun. She had one bullet left. One saved specially through the years, for this day. One that would finish the task she had set herself and bring her, at last, to her real home.

Two hundred down.


End file.
